A hilariously bad phone interview with Google

Heh, I've had this happen twice now with Google.

The first time was for a role I actually applied for. I was honoured to even be considered, but when the interview went similarly to how you describe I was rather gutted.

The second time I received an email and a subsequent phonecall out of the blue. Again I was excited and told that it'd be an 'informal chat regarding opportunities here at Google'. The call started off great - being told that you could work from any office all over the world, employee benefits, exciting-sounding projects, etc. etc.

Then I was asked to rate myself on a "scale of 1-10, where 1-5 you have some knowledge on the subject, 6-7 you're considered an expert, 8-9 you've published work in this area such as a book, and 10 you're the person who wrote the language or you're considered a world authority on the subject." And from then on in it just descended into madness.

How does an average, even an above average person, ever rate themselves - if they're being reasonably modest - above 4? "I see you're keen on Python, how do you rate yourself there? By the way, you know the guy who invented Python? Yeah, he works here, heh heh" and so on. Following on from that little taster (which made me feel approx. 1" tall) we then had a 'quick fire' round of relatively obscure questions. A held my own here but given how my confidence was undermined at this point I don't think it was especially representative of myself technically.

And that was that. The only thing that I can take away from these is that I'm not the 'type' of person Google are looking for. Good luck to anyone who is.

Sadly my tiny linode box can't handle the traffic currently. See article here: http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.mkrecny.com/?p=76

It is funny that this recruiter guy "reserves" 10 for the inventor of the programming language. If I wrote the English dictionary and grammar system, would you assume I could write like Shakespeare?

I had a full loop with Google last year. It was awful. The guys were really aggressive and incredibly offensive, reminding me time and time again that they hated the company I worked for. Which is fine if it's your personal opinion, but don't invite me to your offices only to insult my employer. Kinda silly, really.

I can't help but wonder that maybe the interview process is broken. Can you really gauge how effective a dev is based on his might at solving a few programming problems on a whiteboard?

I've seen the strongest candidates in this field end up being the worst devs (bad team players, no design docs, not adhering to spec, crap unmaintanable code), and vice versa. Which makes me wonder. Anyone using any interesting techniques out there other than the standard "here's a tricky problem, now solve it"?

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being reserved only for individuals who are wiretapping Google's offices, what is your degree of certainty that this phone call was actually from a Google employee?

This sounds exactly like my experience with a phone interview with a Facebook engineer.

Wow, that sounds terrible - sorry that one of our guys (in this case, really sounds like a recruiter than an actual engineer) expected you to know a bunch of random technical facts.

If it makes you feel better, our technical phone interviews + onsites are better; the engineers who you'd talk to care more about you being a smart candidate than trying to get you to rank yourself lower. I'm sure there are some people who scoff at candidates who, say, don't have the CS Ph.D that they do, but we honestly do have an interviewer feedback system that tells those people to knock it off.

My onsite interview with Google was very fair. It was an all-day event. The engies asked very tough questions and expected you to come up with the answer in about 30 minutes (45 minutes max but you need time to ask/interact).

I didn't make it. But I don't feel their engies are assholes (well may be a couple in my 5 interviews). I have a feeling like they don't care how you interact/approach to solve the issue. If you cannot solve it you fail! There is no partial credit whatsoever. This could turn out to be great if you have canned solutions.

I had a similar interview with google. Said that I'm a jack of all trades and I said memorization is for dummies (and told him I just google for rote memorization). I told him that I've built websites for 1000s of users and been a lead in different roles. My ability is to be the.... I'll learn it and get it done.... not the person who memorized every fucking sorting algorithm there is. I wished someone read Joel On software's guide to hiring developers.

Site appears to be down - anyone snag a cache? Looks like google didn't

Heh.

I appear to be blacklisted from google. I interviewed 4 years ago over a 3 month period, after which they said they were excited to send me an offer.

The next day, they called me back and said, no, they were not going to be giving me an offer.

Recently, I applied for a position I thought I was perfect for - and the google recruiter contacted me asking to talk about the position.

He asked if I had ever applied to google before, and I told him I had. I related a little about the experience and what happened.

He put the phone interview on pause and said he was going to go look into that and talk to the previous recruiter.

Radio silence for over a week. I sent him an email asking if my previous interview experience precluded me from interviewing there...

He said he was still collecting data.

Then he called me last friday and said that after reviewing the position with the hiring manager, they decided not to move forward with me any further, but he had no information as to the reasoning.

That was that.

But here is what I find both hilarious and infuriating: in my current company, a small design firm of just 10 people, we design a lot of google infrastructure projects; their datacenter fiber plants in the EU, NC, projects for gmail and other infrastructure projects they have going on.

I am good enough to be a contractor designing the systems - but apparently not good enough to be an employee.

I wonder if they are reading my emails or something ;)

Thanks for writing this.

I've been taking a "break" and am finishing up work on my own project. I got one of these emails from a Google recruiter last week.

I had applied to Google back in 2009, but chickened and canceled the interview after I read about the useless and non-trivial theoretical questions they ask.

After reading this, I think I'll still pass. But for different reasons :).